181–190 of 217 posts
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This is true, or was true until Apple released the M1 / M2 chips.
Even then new Reddit makes safari stutter if scroll too long/several tabs
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Just a note on soldering: I’m perfectly capable of soldering VQFN at home, but these days it’s so easy to order fully assembled boards from JLCPCB that I think lost hobbyists would start with the Pico and then go straight to turnkey assembly once they have a custom design. I stopped assembling my own boards two years ago (after a decade) once I placed my first turnkey order at JLCPCB. Ten pieces of a simple RP2040 bo…
Hmm. You have a point about RP2040 being a thing that JLCPCB's assembly service benefits from. A singular chip that you "plan to use in most projects", along with pre-loaded pick-and-place machines that have common I2C attachments, makes sense in the scheme of factory design. (While something like Microchip's AVR DA vs AVR DB vs AVR DD vs AVR EA loses out, because SKUs are the enemy of such an assembly line as you'd…
I’ve moved to a model of only designing with parts available at JLCPCB (or LCSC, which you can have JLC order internally for you). It requires a change in mindset, but being able to spend $300 on QTY 10 fully assembled complex PCBAs delivered in two weeks is a revelation. No more boxes of components sitting around my lab. No more hours spent doing microscope and tweezer placement. No more orders split across Digikey and Mouser. I order the PCB and everything else from the same place. Hell I got my first CNC machined parts from JLCPCB recently and their quote was 20% cheaper than the other Chinese CNC house I was using.
It’s real nice. I focus on design and testing and not doing assembly.
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When I was living in Israel, I was never able to find reasonably priced older 2nd hand x86s; there is no eBay culture, and somehow when companies have an upgrade cycle and retire a lot of old hardware, it is always to middle men who then ask for ridiculous prices (like 70% of price of new, faster, more efficient, cooler machine). I wonder if that’s unique to Israel, or if the ease of getting reasonable 2nd hand hardw…
Big advantage of Raspberry Pi is that they are available everywhere for similar price. At least now that the shortage has ended. They have resellers all over the world which means can shop in local language. My guess is that most of used PCs come from the US. A lot of companies have refresh cycles where buy new hardware every five years or so. There are a lot of support employees that get cheap mini PCs.
And they are promptly out of stock, I assume. I've owned every Raspberry Pi since the first one but I think the 4 was my last one. They are fun to tinker with with but not great for long-term use in my experience. I felt like I had to babysit it way too often, it absolutely wasn't a "setup an forgot" device, again in my experience. It'd be rock solid for 2-3 months then randomly stop working, rinse and repeat. A litt…
> wasn't a "setup an forgot" device It absolutely is. I have 4 RPi devices in the house actively doing work and I only touch them when I need to change a feature or something like that. 1. Front end to my 3D printer - RPi 2. 2. Magic Mirror - RPi 4. 3. Front end to my ancient HP LaserJet to make it wireless - RPi Zero W 4. Detector for Dryer finishing and sending me a text message - RPi Zero 2 W These require no baby…
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The Orange Pi 5 has a very similar CPU and is comparable in cost. The Plus is the "premium" model with things like 2x 2.5G ethernet ports.
Wait wait wait. 2 LANs on PCIe? One M.2 slot on PCIe? And this works with armbian? That's my new router board, if it works okay! And... if i can buy it anywhere...
I have an ordinary Orange Pi 5 for my HomeAssistant setup and it's quite alright. Having a real NVME SSD in there instead of an SD card gives me peace of mind. I did some tests with zstd and found it about 50% the speed of my Threadripper (restricted to 8 cores for the test). The non-efficiency cores are therefore probably more than twice as fast as a 2 generation old AMD chip, which is pretty impressive.
For the cost of the Orange Pi 5 Plus, you're starting to get into similarly-equipped Intel N100-based machines. I haven't seen any benchmarks comparing the two, but I'd assume it's faster. So you might want to look at those. (Amazon is expensive; everyone gets these from AliExpress. I also don't know how well modern Intel machines do booting without a keyboard and a mouse; the ARM SBCs do great.)
And they are promptly out of stock, I assume. I've owned every Raspberry Pi since the first one but I think the 4 was my last one. They are fun to tinker with with but not great for long-term use in my experience. I felt like I had to babysit it way too often, it absolutely wasn't a "setup an forgot" device, again in my experience. It'd be rock solid for 2-3 months then randomly stop working, rinse and repeat. A litt…
Interesting, my experience with pihole has been basically set it and forget it for several years now. With BirdNET-pi, I have had a few hiccups due to the SD cards getting worn out from constant writing.
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Sadly, yes. You can buy whatever else you want, even cheaper and better today, and after three years, getting a modern supported OS will be a total pain, due to binary blobs, custom drivers, custom "design solutions" etc. RaspberryPi is currently the only SBC where you can take any revision of it and still get fully working(! yes, even wifi, bluetooth, etc.) software for it, even if it's not the newest and the greate…
This is just nonsense. There are plenty of old (6-7 year old boards) very well supported in Linux. I've been using several such boards for that long. If anything, support gets better with time, usually.
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my 2¢: if external storage is not an option for some reason, dropping ext4 in favor for F2FS will do a lot of good for sparing your sdcard from early death (due to superblock updates happening every so often), if not for performance due to ext4 not being flash-aware by design. If that's not an option AND your setup has no power issues (e.g. it has good power supply, externally powered usb hub etc), disabling journall…
SD cards have a FTL internally; I'm not sure F2FS helps you much there.
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> wasn't a "setup an forgot" device It absolutely is. I have 4 RPi devices in the house actively doing work and I only touch them when I need to change a feature or something like that. 1. Front end to my 3D printer - RPi 2. 2. Magic Mirror - RPi 4. 3. Front end to my ancient HP LaserJet to make it wireless - RPi Zero W 4. Detector for Dryer finishing and sending me a text message - RPi Zero 2 W These require no baby…
How do you tell when the dryer is finished?
This is my second attempt at solving this problem. In the first incarnation, I attempted to do audio recognition for the sound that the dryer makes when its done, but I just couldn't get it to work well. The sound was too short to generate a good signature.